1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication terminal such as a fixed phone, mobile phone, or personal digital assistants (PDA) and, more particularly, to a communication terminal having a function of setting, as an object to be kept secret, entry data stored in, e.g., an internal phone book or schedule book of the terminal, and limiting display of the data, and an incoming call notification control method of the communication terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a communication terminal such as a mobile phone or PDA has a phone book. By using this phone book, a user can place an outgoing call by a simple operation, i.e., only by selecting communication partner information stored in the phone book. Also, when an incoming call arrives, a user can confirm, e.g., the name of the transmission source by searching the phone book for communication partner information of the transmission source and displaying the information.
Communication partner information stored in the phone book is personal information. Therefore, it is very unpreferable, from the viewpoint of privacy protection, to allow a third party to freely see this communication partner information. For this reason, to increase the secrecy of communication partner information stored in the phone book, various types of communication terminals having secret functions have been proposed.
For example, Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2000-307706 discloses a technique by which a terminal user sets “display”/“non-display” to each communication partner information as an object to be kept secret. When an operation of displaying an outgoing call log or incoming call log is performed, outgoing call log information or incoming call log information corresponding to a communication partner set as “non-display” is not displayed.
Also, Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 11-308360 discloses a technique by which a user sets “secret” and “display”/“non-display” to each communication partner information stored in a phone book. When mail is received from a communication partner set as “secret”, the mail text is displayed if this communication partner is “display”, and not displayed if the communication partner is “non-display”.
In each of the above conventional communication terminals, when an incoming call has arrived or e-mail is received, the name of the calling person or the contents of the e-mail are not displayed. However, an incoming call notification operation of notifying the user of the arrival of the incoming call or a mail reception notification operation of notifying the user of the reception of the e-mail is performed. Therefore, a message indicating the arrival of the incoming call or the reception of the e-mail is displayed. Accordingly, if a third party borrows or steals this communication terminal, he or she knows that secret data is stored. This secret data may leak if the third person performs a secret canceling operation.